A few months back I drew the following Medium Large strip in honor of a particular "holiday":

It got some very nice comments from readers, people chuckled and everyone moved on to the next day.

Then this past weekend all hell broke loose vis-à-vis some rather brazen pirates and suddenly the strip was pulled out from its murky archives, first appearing--to my total delight and shock--on Ezra Klein's blog on The American Prospect!

This in turn led to a link by Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Independent as well as in his own blog Attackerman, in which he described the comic as being "apt." "APT"! That may very well be the highest compliment Medium Large has ever been paid.

The result has been a tremendous spike in readership (temporary though it may be) and not a bad boost to one Italian-Portuguese cartoonist's ego. So thank you to all the great politicos and pundits who kindly thought to highlight the strip (and who politely disregarded that I also spent a full week having Sally Forth and her daughter Hilary argue over chocolate Easter bunny ears for what may very well be my 17th time).

Thursday, April 2, 2009

I'll be on the radio tonight--INTERNET radio, which as we all now is the future today! (Unlike a certain long-promised personal jetpack that has yet to materialize in great numbers).

So if you happen to be free TONIGHT AT 9:30 PM EST (and can DVR 30 Rock) then by all means please listen to my mellifluous Long Island accent as I ramble incoherently in six directions at once on the ELVIS DINGELDEIN'S DRUNKEN SOLILOQUY show. Elvis and I will be discussing Sally Forth, Medium Large and how to feasibly restructure the world's economy using the very same system professional gamblers employ to lead such happy, steady, successful lives.

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Pens the comic strips Sally Forth and Medium Large. Writes for The Onion News Network. Serves as head writer for the PBS series SeeMore's Playhouse (for which his script won two regional Emmys). Was afraid of the color yellow until about age nine. Tans a little too well to be trusted by security.

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A simple grilled cheese sandwich. Something that can be procured anywhere at any time. Nothing too exciting, right?

But what if I put a little butter on the bread before I grilled that sandwich? That would add a little extra zing, right? And what if instead of using plain old American cheese I opted for something a tad more exotic, like Camembert, Stilton or Roquefort? Now we're talking, right?

And what if instead of using bread for my grilled cheese sandwich I used two large blocks of pure platinum? And what if instead of eating the platinum I sold it and then used that small fortune as venture capital for a Beijing-based conglomerate that could take advantage of Chinese local business incentives, cheap labor, lax environmental laws and surging global interest in the fastest-growing economy in the world, thereby ensuring returns in the billions of dollars even in the face of a collapsing U.S. dollar and a massive industrial shift from the technical to service business sector? Wouldn't that be nice?

That's exactly what Francesco Explains It All is. In an endless buffet of indistinguishable tastes, it's the grilled platinum Stilton cheese sandwich that could forever destabilize geoeconomics. Care for a bite?